VA plans cloud-based app labs

By GCN Staff

Aug 04, 2017

To help deliver better care to veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs increasingly relies on a growing number of health care applications meet its mission goals.

In order to better manage the increasing number of public and internal applications, the VA wants a cloud-based “development and test environment” for those applications, and is seeking industry input on what's possible. The development and test environment is intended to help VA officials evaluate, recommend and track them for their ability to improve health care performance measures. The department also wants to ensure VA applications are secure, acceptable to end users, improve workflow and provide value to patients and staff.

Accordingly, VA outlined the following requirements:

A low-impact cloud-based infrastructure-as-service and software-as-a-service environment available within a commercial cloud deployment model.

A Future Technologies Laboratory (FTL), a virtualized, development environment that VA innovators could use for development and testing related to cloud computing standards

Future Technologies Laboratory Secure, a cloud-based user acceptance testing and pilot environment, that provides virtual systems for testing for projects that require the use of personally identifiable information.

Subject matter experts to help with VistA development and the agency's Enterprise Health Management Platform as implemented in the FTL.